Graph Contrastive Invariant Learning from the Causal Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mo, Yanhu, Wang, Xiao, Fan, Shaohua, Shi, Chuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Mo, Yanhu
Wang, Xiao
Fan, Shaohua
Shi, Chuan
author_facet Mo, Yanhu
Wang, Xiao
Fan, Shaohua
Shi, Chuan
contents Graph contrastive learning (GCL), learning the node representation by contrasting two augmented graphs in a self-supervised way, has attracted considerable attention. GCL is usually believed to learn the invariant representation. However, does this understanding always hold in practice? In this paper, we first study GCL from the perspective of causality. By analyzing GCL with the structural causal model (SCM), we discover that traditional GCL may not well learn the invariant representations due to the non-causal information contained in the graph. How can we fix it and encourage the current GCL to learn better invariant representations? The SCM offers two requirements and motives us to propose a novel GCL method. Particularly, we introduce the spectral graph augmentation to simulate the intervention upon non-causal factors. Then we design the invariance objective and independence objective to better capture the causal factors. Specifically, (i) the invariance objective encourages the encoder to capture the invariant information contained in causal variables, and (ii) the independence objective aims to reduce the influence of confounders on the causal variables. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on node classification tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_12564
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graph Contrastive Invariant Learning from the Causal Perspective
Mo, Yanhu
Wang, Xiao
Fan, Shaohua
Shi, Chuan
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Graph contrastive learning (GCL), learning the node representation by contrasting two augmented graphs in a self-supervised way, has attracted considerable attention. GCL is usually believed to learn the invariant representation. However, does this understanding always hold in practice? In this paper, we first study GCL from the perspective of causality. By analyzing GCL with the structural causal model (SCM), we discover that traditional GCL may not well learn the invariant representations due to the non-causal information contained in the graph. How can we fix it and encourage the current GCL to learn better invariant representations? The SCM offers two requirements and motives us to propose a novel GCL method. Particularly, we introduce the spectral graph augmentation to simulate the intervention upon non-causal factors. Then we design the invariance objective and independence objective to better capture the causal factors. Specifically, (i) the invariance objective encourages the encoder to capture the invariant information contained in causal variables, and (ii) the independence objective aims to reduce the influence of confounders on the causal variables. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on node classification tasks.
title Graph Contrastive Invariant Learning from the Causal Perspective
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12564